Italian broadcaster Mediaset has secured a victory in its legal battle with Vivendi-owned video sharing site Dailymotion over the latter’s distribution of copyrighted material.
The Court of Rome found Dailymotion liable, confirming a previous ruling in July 2019, and sentenced the video site to fines totalling over €22 million for the publication of 15,000 video clips that included material illegally uploaded from Mediaaset programmes covering a total of 30,000 minutes of content.
The court also sentenced Dailymotion to pay a daily penalty of €1,000 for any further illicit distribution and ordered the French site to pay €85,000 in legal costs.
Mediaset has also been given the right to publish details of the sentence in the Corriere della Sera and Sole 24 Ore newspapers.
Mediaset has also won a separate legal case against US-based portal Veoh. The latter was ordered to pay the Italian company over €3.3 million and €60,000 in costs. In the Veoh case the court also ordered the portal to pay €1,000 a day for further infringements and for the publication of details in the two newspapers.
Mediaset has waged long-running legal battles against alleged copyright infringers on multiple fronts. In 2019 it secured another win against a third site, Vimeo, with the Court of Rome ordering the latter to pay €5 million in damages and €80,000 in costs.
Earlier that year, Mediaset also secured what it described as legal victories against Yahoo! And Facebook for copyright infringement.
The battle against Dailymotion carries added piquancy given Mediaset’s long-running feud with its parent company Vivendi, which is also a major shareholder in Mediaset itself.
